Die Schreckenskammer des Dr. Sex

For a zero-budget indie film, "Behind Locked Doors" isn't half bad. The basic plot--about two city women who are abducted from a swinger's party in the country to become unwilling sex slaves-is actually pretty good.

The film's first 14 minutes get things rolling pretty fast: A group of 20-somethings dance and mingle in an abandoned barn deep in the middle of nowhere. One by one, the couples pare off and get it on in various haylofts. This sexy opening reaches its crescendo when the hottest guy at the party takes an interest in permanent virgin, Ann. Sequestered in a loft, he puts the moves on her but she resists hard enough to make Doris Day proud. This leads to a not-bad rape scene, which is interrupted when the film's weakest link, a bird-watching Henry Kissinger clone, arrives and whacks the poor stud with a pitchfork.

Having established himself as a good guy, the Kissinger clone leaves and then orders his hunky handyman (who gives off a major porn star vibe), to drain the gas from Ann's car, so she'll be forced to walk to his house and ask for help. This Ann does, along with her lesbian friend, which leads us to the film's dullest segment: a 20-minute sequence where we get to know the Kissinger clone (who is a mortician) and his improbable sister, while Ann and her pal get comfy in their room. Finally, the plot kicks in again, as the girls realize why the Kissinger clone tricked them into staying the night. Things pick up from there, with a couple of tame rape scenes and some genuinely creepy scenes in the spooky, cadaver-filled dungeon.

It's a shame the producer made some decisions which detract from the film's impact: casting a portly old Kissinger clone as a serial rapist, adding the wildly unlikely character of his sister helping (and even watching him) performing the rapes and a clumsily handled climactic scene in the dungeon. With just a few changes, this could have been a major underground classic. Imagine if instead of a bird-watching old mortician, you had a ruggedly handsome ex-con. If the little old lady sister character had been replaced by a two more cons who had escaped with the lead con and killed the inhabitants of the house, taking it for their own. If all three cons were having their ways with the captive women, before offing them. Much stronger, scarier and sexier!

It is what it is though, and it's not all bad. I enjoyed this film and others who like '60s ephemera, grindhouse films, underground indie works, etc. Will probably "dig it" as well.

Two swinging chicks get trapped out in the country after attending a party. When directed to a phone at a house down the street they become the test subjects of a depraved maniac doctor with his sister wanting to use there bodies for sex experiments. "Behind Locked Doors" is actually a notch above most of the Something Weird titles. It does have plenty of sleaze to go around but the acting is pretty good for this type of production. The story is pretty solid as well and the production value is pretty good too. If you like films like "The Last House on the Left", "I Spit on Your Grave" or "The House on the Edge of the Park" you may like this one too.

When their car is deliberately drained of gas by ex-mortician Dr.Bradley Ann Henderson and her semi-lesbian friend Terry Wilson seek help in Bradley's isolated house where he lives with his creepy sister Myla and a servant Freddy.Dr.Bradley captures both girls for sex as he wants to find 'perfect love mate'.His ghastly memorial exhibition room with naked women looks truly memorable.Very likable exploitation movie directed by Charles Romine and shot in upstate New York.There is plenty of delicious sleaze and mannequin-like naked ladies are lovely.The film is quite atmospheric too!6 cat-fights out of 10.The climax slightly reminded me "Maniac" with Joe Spinell.

Pretty work colleagues Ann and Terry (Eve Reeves and Joyce Danner) attend a wild party at an isolated barn where Ann is almost raped -- saved in the nick of time by voyeur Dr. Bradley (Daniel Garth), who hits Ann's attacker with a pitch fork handle. When the girls decide to leave the party, they discover that their car has no gas, so they walk to a nearby house to ask if they can use the owner's phone.

The girls are surprised to find that the house belongs to Dr. Bradley and his sister Ida (Irene Lawrence), but are disappointed to hear that the Bradleys' phone is out of order and that their car is being serviced. The Bradley's invite Ann and Terry to stay for the night, but the girls become worried when they discover that the windows to their room are barred and that their door has been locked from the outside. It turns out that Ann and Terry are just the latest in a long line of female 'guests' at the house, all of whom became unwilling participants in Dr. Bradley's sexual experiments.

If The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had been made a decade earlier, then the girls in Behind Locked Doors might have been more wary about knocking on the door of a remote house in the country while looking for help. Speaking of Tobe Hooper's '74 classic, there's a chase scene in Behind Locked Doors that gave me serious Texas Chain Saw vibes, while the ending, in which Dr. Bradley's 'human mannequins' come to life for revenge, reminded me of another horror classic... William Lustig's excellent Maniac (1980). I wonder if either Hooper or Lustig were influenced by this film.

Of course, Behind Locked Doors isn't in the same league as either The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Maniac: it's cheap, sleazy trash that suffers from clumsy direction, bad acting and terrible pacing (the first 15 to 20 minutes primarily consists of crap go-go dancing to bad music). Director Charles Romine seems more intent on catering to the dirty raincoat brigade than in delivering tension and scares, missing no opportunity for his female stars to get naked, even having lesbian Terry masturbate under the covers while sharing a bed with Ann.

4.5/10 for the sleaze, rounded down to 4 for the bit where Dr. Bradley covers his body with baby oil -- horrifying!

This film is long overdue for rediscovery! Apparently titled ANYBODY ANYWAY until Harry Novak got his hands on it, by any name it smells as sweet. The barn sequence at the beginning with its twenty minutes of grade "A" film library/go-go music (some of it recognizable from H.G.Lewis movies) is worth the price of admission alone. This is one politically incorrect film. From the adenoidal Mr. Bradley and his "love experiments" to the jaw-dropping "happy" ending, trash fans can not go wrong with this one. The tone is perfect--not too self-parodic, but definitely impossible to take seriously as it catalogs the various clichés of male fantasies that invariably appear in softcore films.